Google CEO Larry Page was interviewed on Charlie Rose recently, and there was certainly some interesting stuff in there. Sadly, the interview suffers from the curse of modern journalism in that it was all a bit timid and civil (no truly harsh and confronting questions), but despite that, it's still a good watch. Two quotes from Page really stood out to me.

I was not a big fan of the direction Carly took HP back in the early 2000s. While I do mourn the HP of old, which once upon a time had the prestige of a company focused on engineering, I don't know if that company would have made it another 3 years at that point... And to be fair, she start with a decimated stock (the tech bubble bursting hit their stock very hard).

Carly started the process of turning HP into a Dell clone, and at the same time participated in the final destruction of what little was left of Digital after Compaq had finished with them (RIP). Pissed off a lot of people at the time...

However, to be fair, if you look at it purely from a financial point of view it did work - immensely well actually. HP's stock grew quite steadily over her tenure and afterwards under Mark Hurd with the EDS merger (which you could say was a continuation of her strategy) - and most people would love to have Mark Hurd back.

HP wasn't the same company she started with, but had she not done some of the things she did it probably would have ended up just like Digital - another engineering driven company that ended up as road kill because of lack of business sense. Everyone hated her at the time, but I don't think it is at all fair to put her on a worst of list - she was far from incompetent.